The Sand Wasps: Natural History and Behavior

This book will be an essential reference for any wasp researcher, beginning or established, as well as an indispensable library holding… The volume summarizes a large literature that would be difficult for any single investigator to assemble, given the many obscure, scattered sources cited and the diversity of languages translated… Given the remarkable expansion of knowledge described in this work, one wonders what the next 40 years of sand wasp research will reveal. -- Joseph R. Coelho * Quarterly Review of Biology * Forty years ago, in The Comparative Ethology and Evolution of the Sand Wasps, Howard Ensign Evans surveyed all that was known of the behavior of sand wasps. By mapping on the group’s cladogram the modifications of their behavior (in nest building, brood provisioning, prey carrying, egg laying, etc.), he showed with unusual clarity the origins and evolution of these wasps’ behavior patterns. The present work by Evans and Kevin O’Neill provides a beautiful update of our knowledge of this behaviorally and ecologically diverse group of wasps. The authors show ever so clearly how this group of large, brightly colored, and behaviorally complex wasps remains attractive to students of animal behavior, and how it offers tremendous potential for an integration of phylogenetic analyses with comparative behavioral studies to reveal a remarkable adaptive radiation in insect behavior. -- Thomas D. Seeley, Cornell University, author of The Wisdom of the Hive: The Social Physiology of Honey Bee Colonies